“Do you mean that?”
“So long as it’s mine to sacrifice.”
She stood up, a wary amusement in her eyes, and I saw that in the folds of her comfortably flabby belly, a crude bone key had been pierced through the skin. Despite the rough edges, I recognized it immediately as a replica of the key the death wore around its waist. If I had doubted their familiarity with the death before, this would have satisfied me.
“There’s an island just a little ways from here. Any who wish to know the death can sit vigil in the sacred caves. And if you survive it? You might know what you wish to.”
I wondered if she thought I would back down at her casual reference to the danger, but I handed her a long coil of sennit braid and asked if someone could show me the way.
“I’ll go as well,” said Tulo, surprising me, because she’d been so silent.
The woman looked at her and then again, and I saw her take in Tulo’s directionless gaze and bulging stomach. “I don’t think you’d want to risk it, fair one,” she said gently. “You may stay with us while your Ana has her vigil.”
“She’s right,” I said. “Something might happen to me.”
“Then I could face the death spirit.”
“The death knows me, Tulo. It’s dangerous, but at least I know some of its ways. You’d stand no chance.”
“I see the spirits every day! How dare you tell me I don’t know them? I could probably do this a thousand times better than you.”
“And if you fail?”
“What about you?”
I could have slapped her. “At least,” I bit out, “I’m not pregnant.”
This made her pause and turn away from me. I could tell the only thing preventing her from entering one of her rages was the watchful presence of the other women. Tulo didn’t like to be left out of anything, let alone something so dangerous and vital to our future. But finally she shrugged and walked several steps away, toward the lagoon.
“Fine. Do what you will. I’ll tell Parech if it kills you.”
Tulo didn’t give me any more of a goodbye than a sullen stare, and even turned her back on the canoe when I tried to wave. I bit my lip. I would see her again. I had to. The old woman herself took me out on the water, maneuvering the one-masted boat with calm efficiency.
“She’s blind,” I said, as though that hadn’t been perfectly obvious. “If I don’t come back, she’ll need to go to Essel. Could you make sure someone takes her?”
She nodded. “I could arrange that. Though we don’t often venture to the big island.”
“She can give you barkcloth and more sennit braid once she gets there.”
The woman waved her hand and turned back to the water, as though a payment hardly mattered. I would have thought these people would be grateful for whatever luxuries they could get from the “big island,” but then, what did I know of such a remote, hardscrabble life?
The sacred caves were located on what looked to me more like a sharply jutting hunk of oversized rock than anything that could reasonably be called an island. There were worn steps carved into one side. She told me to climb them and follow the path into the caves. I didn’t imagine I could easily get lost. I thanked her again and grabbed one of the handholds.
“That baby she has,” the woman said, as I swung my weight from the boat and onto the rock. I looked back at her. “You’re not jealous of the father?”
I felt as confused as if she had asked me if I were jealous of the air. “He’s the reason why I’m here.”
She smiled. “Some advice, Ana: don’t leave the caves before the death. No matter what. I’ll return here in three days.”
I climbed the steep rock face and watched her nimble little boat vanish in the ocean haze. The path here wound around the other side of the tiny rock and then dipped into a narrow, damp cave. I peered inside and took a deep breath. I couldn’t stop this once I started. The lightless passage wound around for what felt like an impossibly long time, given the size of the island. Finally, it emerged into a much wider space, lit with sunlight that streamed through high gaps in the ceiling. The walls were decorated in ancient, deceptively simple paintings. A crude, spindly death with its mask and key and a star on its chest. Hunters spearing a great fish as it tried to swim away. A wooden mask hanging high on the wall, shadowed in such a way that for a horrified moment I thought the death had arrived even before I invoked it.
I started to tremble and forced myself to stillness. The old woman had led me through the formal preparations for the ritual on the way here. Carefully, I removed my clothes and shoes and stepped into the spring bubbling beneath the death’s mask. It smelled like tree resin with just a hint of something thin and astringent, like blood. I bathed myself thoroughly and then took the plain earthenware bowl waiting on the edge of the pool. I filled it to the brim and then carefully drank half. My skin prickled. The light in the room began to change in a way that was by now quite familiar. Naked and shivering, I walked again to the center of the room and knelt. To my surprise, no blood sacrifice was involved in this summoning. There would be no binding in any of the ways in which I was familiar. This ritual was more ancient, more primal, and therefore more dangerous. I had entered the death’s space an uninvited guest. I would offer my truest self to it, and in return it would share with me as spirits so rarely shared with humans. We would acknowledge each other as equals, not as powers warring for dominance.
I looked up at the death’s mask and said, in a voice too loud to shake, “Mask, heart, and key. Won’t you share my drink?”
I said this in the language of the pierced woman, though she’d assured me that any language would do. And it appeared, stepping out of the wall as though from another room, the cold key swinging at its waist. It acknowledged me with just a nod and, to my surprise, knelt and lifted my half-drunk bowl of spring water with scaly, spindly fingers that unrolled like a lizard’s tongue.
“So you wish to cheat death after all,” it said, when the water from the bowl had somehow vanished beyond its mask.
“He’s too young to die.”
“And when has that ever mattered to death?”
“Then what does matter to it?”
“You truly want to know?”
“Why else have I come?”
It acknowledged this with a shrug. “Remember,” it said. “You have invited me inside.” It touched my forehead and I fell, dazed, upon the rock.
Dreams and memories and reality all jumbled up between them. Which are the death’s, which are mine? It is as if my younger self is a ghost screaming a warning across time. Don’t leave home to sneak into the forest, she says, don’t leave your mother to care for your father so that neither of them can escape that tiny house. She could have gotten out, I was told afterward, but she tried to save my sickly father and so they both drowned instead.
You have killed your parents, says the younger me, the angry ghost.
I killed my parents, I say to the death.
But then, “No,” it says, “I did.”
I see the flood sideways and upside down. My parents frightened and confused by the rapidly rising water. My mother screams my name.
“Aoi,” she calls, over and over again, until my father promises I’ve already left.
“It’s that boy,” he says, and I can’t believe that even as the water is rushing in through the door like a tidal wave my father is attempting to remember the name of a boy I played with in the forest. “She’ll be fine,” he says.
My mother tries to carry him, but my father’s been sick for weeks and his legs can’t struggle against the rushing water. It’s up to their chests now. I see, through the death’s eyes, how the entrance is about to collapse, trapping them inside. I see, through the death’s eyes, that my father knows as well.
“Leave me, leave me,” he sobs and begs for what seems like an eternity. My mother just screams at him to “move, please move,” though I can see in her face that she knows it’s useless. She looks at
the door and back at her husband. Her daughter is on one side, her death on the other. The door collapses inward. She chooses death.
Living killed my parents, I think.
“Good,” says the death, plucking their souls from their bodies like ripe fruit. “Why don’t you ever think of them?” it asks.
“I wanted to forget.” My parents are floating, dead in the muddy water. “Do you remember all your dead?”
“Yes. Yes. Yes.” Each repetition is shot through with a different sensation: first hunger, then satisfaction, then grief. I think, is that how the death feels? Everything all contradicted, all at once? I think, is that any different from a human?
“Good,” says the death.
I am lying on the floor of the cave again and the death is beside me. The world glows with spirit light; it is dark outside.
“How can I save him?” I ask.
“You’re asking how you can overcome death.”
“Am I?”
“And you know, young napulo; you know there’s only one way to do that.”
“You want me to bind you?”
Its mask is an inch from my face. The holes of its eyes burn with a dark, charred flame. I recall this burning chill from when I nearly died. It scares me more now. “I would make your life a misery if you tried and lived. Your every breath would be shadowed by my key. I would crawl through your dreams and poison your love and destroy what you touched until you would beg to know what lies beyond the gate.”
I think of Parech. I think of his bemused resignation in the face of this monster that now threatens me. “I wish death would die,” I say, an echo of a moment far removed from this and yet intimately related. I am reckless in my terror. I’m not like Parech, I’m not like my parents. I cannot accept this masked thing, this scourge of everyone I have loved.
Its mask touches my face, then pushes through. I cannot move my limbs. I cannot feel myself for the cold. I am dying. I have lost already, and Parech will not be long behind me. I stand at the gate. I can see no walls, but the air is like that of the cave: dank and humid. The light is dim, as though filtering through clouded stars. The death puts its key in the lock.
I try frantically to think of a way to fight it and remember the only time I ever saw the death disconcerted.
“How much do you really know,” I say, “about the domain you claim to rule?”
It pauses, removes the key. “Watch,” it says, and then we are somewhere else—a beach at sunset beneath a receding tide. A fire burns, and by its size and the unmistakable scent of roasting flesh I know it for a pyre. A small group of people stand upwind. They are short and oddly bent, as though suffering under an invisible load. Their hair is tangled and unkempt, they wear nothing but the crudest draping of undyed barkcloth over their genitals. A woman with a face as scarred and pitted as the skin of an orange is weeping. A support on the pyre collapses in a cascade of sparks. The smell momentarily intensifies. The woman drops to her knees, tilts back her head, and starts to keen, a ululating wail that so powerfully reminds me of Tulo that I gasp. I wonder where we are. I wonder who this woman has lost. No matter how strange and foreign their appearance or their clothes might be, her grief has connected us.
The man beside her, who has also been crying, touches her shoulder gently. He says something. I hear the words, but they’re so unlike any language I’ve ever heard, I can’t even determine the region.
“What is this?” I say to the death beside me.
“That which you profess to hate.”
Though the death is beside me, it is also beside the funeral pyre. Its mask is longer and more angular. Around its waist is not so much a key as a rounded, whittled stick jutting upward. It reaches inside the flames and pulls out a little girl, hardly older than three.
“Who are these people?”
“Your ancestors.”
It seems nothing so much as amused by my disbelief.
“Thousands of years ago,” it says. “The world was different then. But some things always remain. Children killed by fevers. Women killed by childbirth. Men killed by men. Death may be inevitable, young napulo, but not the manner of it. I may reap the dead, but you give me the grisly harvest.”
The woman attempts to run into the fire. The man drags her back only after she has burned her hand. I wonder if the wound will kill her, if she will get her wish, and become another soul for death to reap.
“But why?” The question bursts from me, like the juice of an overripe fruit. “Why must you? What about death says you must take Parech’s soul though he’s so young?”
“I take many souls his age.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” it agrees.
The world goes black. No, there is a little light, like that from the glowing embers of a fading fire. A man sits before it, and he makes the hunchbacked people from a moment before seem like models of good posture. His face hangs in so many folds and wrinkles it’s difficult to make out his eyes. His nose seems to have collapsed inward. His skin is the brown of rotting paper, his movements slow and painfully enfeebled.
“Were I to take his soul,” says the death, invisible now, “would you call that evil?”
“He’s old. He’s had his time.”
“But look how he struggles to live. If death is wrong, how does old age make it better?”
“He’s suffering!”
I don’t see the death act, but the old man slumps forward. What little I can see of his face relaxes, and I know his soul has left.
“Would you see suffering?” asks the death, and though I’m thinking no, no more, I say nothing. But it’s not a moment of unspeakable age or unspeakable grief it makes me look upon, rather, one of familiarity and comfort. It’s our house on the beach, and I see that Parech has finished the foundations and floor for the new room. I grin and almost call out to him before I hear the sound of someone retching. It’s Parech, a little ways from the house, gripping his stomach. I call his name, but he doesn’t hear me. He sinks to his knees, not quite groaning but with a look on his face like he wants to scream.
“Stop,” I tell the death, “stop this. I don’t want to see this. That’s why I’m here. To help him.”
“But he’s suffering,” says the death, precisely mimicking my intonation of a moment before.
“He’s young!”
“So which is it that makes death immoral? Age or suffering?”
Parech staggers to his feet, though I wish I could make him sit down and rest. How many times has he hidden this from us? “Why do we have either?” I whisper. “Why can’t we end both?”
The death gives me a small mercy; Parech vanishes and we are once again in the cave. The sun has risen.
“All bindings are between a human and a spirit, but without age and suffering there is no such thing as a human.”
The truth of its words deflate me. I see that what I have been secretly hoping for—a way for the three of us to be young and happy forever—is impossible.
“Are we nothing else?”
“You would ask me that?”
I think of Tulo’s dancing, Parech’s constant laughter. I think of the year we have had together and I know what the death means: I have been happier than most.
“How long have you known the world?” I ask.
“As long as humans have.”
“Forever?”
It laughs. This is first time I have heard the death laugh; it echoes in the hollow of my throat and makes me want to vomit. “Not so long as that. There were other deaths, for other things. Some things so far apart from human you might not recognize them as living.”
“So how can there yet be things you don’t know?” I say.
“No one can know everything.”
“No human, perhaps.”
“No thing.”
“But what you don’t know,” I say, thinking aloud, “is that which can bind you.”
It moves slowly, as though through water. Its fingers glide t
o caress my cheek. “Careful, Aoi,” it says. “I may still yet take you.”
But while it did not, I would ask what I could. “They say the sacrifice of wind is time and pain. Water is memory. Fire is freedom. But what is the sacrifice of death?”
It is silent, and very still, for a very long time. I cannot tell quite how long, but the cave goes dark again and I begin to shiver with cold and forgotten hunger. I long to move, I long to stand and run back through that passageway and into glorious open air, but I recall the pierced woman’s warning and remain. If the death means to avoid its obligation by waiting me out, it will be disappointed. But the effort at remaining still takes its toll as the hours continue to slide by. My throat is parched, but I don’t dare get another drink from the spring. My eyes flutter. I grow terrified that it might take my soul in my sleep. My arms grow a line of red spots from incessant pinches. And then, finally, the sun rises again.
“Life.”
It vanishes and I fall back against the rock.
The old woman took us both home, though she had to sail through a war to get there. The remnants of the Maaram army had hidden themselves deep in the atolls, including her own island. In the midst of my death vigil, they had launched their sneak attack, injuring some villagers in the process of commandeering their boats. We didn’t imagine they’d get very far, though, so the woman offered to sail around the main harbor and drop us off.
Tulo was very apologetic in her own way. When I first climbed inside the boat she hugged me and buried her face in my neck, breathing deeply as though she’d never thought to smell me again. I silently forgave her. Who understood her temper better than I?
I felt curiously calm, given the intensity of what I’d just experienced. The world of insurmountable worries and impossible hopes I’d left still seemed very far away. I’d seen the funeral of a girl ten thousand years dead and felt that mother’s grief as though it were my own. I’d finally understood that Parech and Tulo would have to die, just as I would. I could only influence the manner of their passing. The death’s sacrifice is life, it had told me, and wasn’t that the ultimate paradox? For no one could live forever and remain human. And only a human could bind the death. So the sacrifice to bind the death spirit was inherently finite. And yet, perhaps, still worth trying.
The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Page 32
